V is for ... Design Terms Glossary

Non-designers Essential Glossary of Design Terms

Every industry, business and profession has its own language and that language can leave you feeling confused and result in lots of misunderstandings. We thought you might find our Design Terms Glossary useful whether you are using the training in our Members’ section or dealing with a graphic designer directly.

Value

A colour’s value in graphic design terms is a measurement of how light or dark a hue (colour) is when mixed with black or white.

The squares here show a value map for pink, purple, yellow & green.

The small circles on the value maps pinpoint a particular value of the colour – move more to the top right and the colour’s value is fully saturated (pure), more to the top left and the value becomes lighter as more white is mixed with it.

Moving down the square adds a percentage of black to the values along the top edge giving a darker shade of the colour.

Adjusting the value of a colour is a good way to add interest to your designs while sticking to your chosen colour pallet.

Vector Graphics

Instead of using pixels to represent images, vector graphics use lines and shapes based on mathematical equations.

Because they don’t rely on pixels VECTOR graphics remains smooth however much you enlarge the image, but a BITMAP version, that is made up of pixels, will quickly become unusable.

Because of this bitmaps have to be re-sized for each use.

With Vector Graphics you are able to draw your logo just once and then re-use the same image file for a business card, a 7ft banner or your website header with no loss of quality AND no extra time or costs involved!

This is not to say that BITMAPS should never be used, in fact they are great for photographs, but for a truly professional result, they should be combined with VECTOR graphics.